


you can feel his disease

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Seduction, Unhealthy Relationships, jopson the enabler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:27:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29335287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: Francis Crozier will be given no quarter.For Terror Rarepair Week 2021, prompt: "We're not so different"
Relationships: Francis Crozier/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18
Collections: The Terror Rarepair Week 2021





	you can feel his disease

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



He couldn’t stop thinking, “So it has come to this.” The words played over and over in his head, like a bar of a particularly repetitive drinking song, gone on for too long until throats were hoarse and glasses were empty. 

_So it has come to this,_ as the caulker’s mate licked a hot line up from his fundament, taking his stones into his mouth one at a time, as if the most tender of fruits. 

_So it has come to this,_ as Mr. Hickey lined himself up and then began to fuck into him, quick and sharp thrusts of his bony hips with a barrage of high pleased noises from his thin lips to match. 

_So it has come to this,_ as sweet young Cornelius clung to him like a limpet after spending inside him, reaching around to caress his wilted, mutinous prick: tender touches that yet failed to bring him to a rise but instead sent him panting into his pillow.

He submitted to the boy’s attentions willingly; he could admit that to himself. But the reason behind the will was harder to ascertain, hidden as it was behind draped layers of unconscious desire. It might well have been vanity. He wanted Hickey because Hickey was a mirror, in a way: another pale Irishman with dreams of glory, and a fascination with what lay beyond the known edges of the map. 

They weren’t so different at all—except—Hickey was young where Francis was old; Hickey was brightly lucid where Francis was dulled and sodden; Hickey was capable, if he so chose, of severe restraint, whereas Francis found himself more often than not with a deep unstable need for touch and attention which he could not forbear himself from spinning wildly into pleas and demands. These demands were sometimes denied and sometimes deferred but very often—more and more often, now, as the ice gripped the ship tighter and the sun slipped away—they were met, with generosity and kindness; Hickey’s touch freely given to an ugly, unfortunate lech who was transformed by it, even if just for a moment, into a man deserving of it. 

Hickey’s fingers seemed like they were made to fit up inside Francis, after slicking themselves on the drooling inside of Francis’s mouth; they knew him from the start, as though in another life Hickey had already learned the way to wrench dry shuddering crises out of him, and had been waiting all his twenty-four years to practice it once more. 

Hickey’s prick was an unprepossessing thing but he wielded it like a flaming sword, all sound and fury when he fucked Francis, not relenting even when Francis started to moan and spit and curse his name, aware on some level that he did not really want relief, and was grateful for Hickey’s effortless understanding of that fact. 

Francis waited for someone to notice. He waited for someone to see the way Hickey always seemed to be underfoot; always seemed to be wandering past, clutching his bucket of tar like a flimsy prop in a play. He itched for someone to call out the oddness of his countenance at meals; his distraction during command meetings; his newfound tendency to stroll the weather deck during certain watches. But not a word was spoken, even by Captain Fitzjames. 

Thomas Jopson could tell Francis with unerring accuracy the fears and desires motivating each of his lieutenants; he could reveal to Francis the concerns of the purser and the preoccupations of the surgeon and his mate; he could transmit, sensitively, the unspoken anxieties of the resolute ice-master himself—yet he could not seem to perceive the shadow that dogged his Captain, slipping in and out of doorways and under bulkheads with sly ease. It was as if Hickey were wearing some sort of cloak; his sheer slight ordinariness affording him what amounted to invisibility from the sharp gaze of the all-seeing steward. 

Or perhaps—equally likely, if not moreso—the fault lay with Jopson. He had spent too much time around Francis. Nearly a decade spent in his Captain’s orbit had bent him, as iron in the stone below permanently damaged a magnetic apparatus, and now his own judgement was forever canted along the same skewed bound. 

Understanding this, Francis became emboldened. 

“Fetch Mr. Hickey for me, Jopson,” he would say; and Hickey would soon appear. “Bring this to Mr. Hickey, Jopson,” he would say; and Hickey would come to him that night and thank him for the tobacco, or the wine, or the fine licorice sweet still wrapped in its paper. 

He even began to allow Hickey to press his leporine mouth to the sagging skin at his neck and suck eager marks there that surely Jopson saw in the mornings, plain as day, when he folded Francis’s stock on and tied his cravat, but did not remark upon even once. 

Francis thus came to know that could not count on his steward to free him from the things that bound him: the ice; the whisky; the crooked smile of his Cornelius that bloomed like a garden rose under his beseeching eye. He would be given no quarter on any side, by anyone. 

And so it has come to this: Hickey says, “Now, Captain, you wouldn’t deny me a taste of you,” and goes to pry Francis’s legs apart, digging his fingertips into the pale mottled meat of Francis’s thighs. 

“I can’t,” Francis mumbles, “you know I can’t deny you a damn thing,” and it’s the rotten sorry truth of it—he tears like wet paper, bending open for him, arching back and squeezing his eyes shut as Hickey’s tongue breaches him. He blindly buries a hand in the heaven-soft mess of Hickey’s fine red hair and strokes it, breathing kindnesses in his mother tongue that soon turn to oaths. 

Francis will not give this up—not now, not when it is the only thing keeping him from the swallowing dark. 

He needs a reason most of all. Something that cannot be ignored. Perhaps if he encourages Hickey, tempts him to new heights of lust and debauchery, he might—slip up, somehow, take things too far, reveal himself for the wicked creature he is and leave Francis with no other choice but to forswear him. 

Yes. Even Jopson will see, then—see what Hickey has done to him—and he will be saved—so until then he welcomes the fox into his bed, and lets him devour what he will. 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


End file.
